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Reading up on Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity as part of my research on non-essential accounts of self in literature, philosophy and neuroscience, I was astounded to come across a New Yorker feature on the philosopher which describes his inability to visualise imagery as an anomaly:
“He has few memories of his past, and he almost never thinks about it, although his memory for other things is very good. He attributes this to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.) He has always believed that this is why he never thinks about his childhood. He imagines other people, in quiet moments, playing their memories in their heads like wonderful old movies, whereas his few memories are stored as propositions, as sentences, with none of the vividness of a picture.”
Surely, Parfit’s experience would be representative of the norm, I thought – i.e. to only be able to see things that are actually there, physically present and immediately visible in the external surroundings? I certainly never had this seeming super-power of creating images myself and had always assumed that my subjective experience corresponded to the average.
As I was soon to find out, however, the absence of a visual component to Parfit’s imagination is part of a neurological condition which affects an estimated 2-5% of the population, including myself, namely aphantasia.
Recent studies into aphantasia (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34296179/) connect it to a number of characteristics and personality traits, including introversion and autistic spectrum features, difficulty with recognition, including face-recognition, impoverished autobiographical memory and less event detail in general memory, difficulty with atemporal and future-directed imagination, including difficulties with projecting oneself into mentally constructed scenes and the future, reduced mind-wandering tendency, elevated levels of IQ and mathematical and scientific occupations.
In addition to these, I think aphantasia is likely connected to a certain philosophical belief or position, namely the non-essentialist view of the self that is found in both the reductionist account of personal identity in Western philosophy and the no-self doctrine in Eastern contemplative traditions. I offer a more extensive argument for this connection here: https://psyche.co/ideas/aphantasia-can-be-a-gift-to-philosophers-and-critics-like-me.
In Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit formulates the view that personal identity is reducible to physical and psychological continuity of mental states, and that there is no ‘further fact’, diachronic entity, or essence that determines identity. The belief that persons are separate entities with continuously existing selves, he argues, is to a great degree an illusion. The New Yorker profile only fleetingly connects Parfit’s philosophy to his aphantasia, but to me it seems an obviously relevant piece of explanation. Our philosophical views are based on our intuitions; our perceptual experience of the world guides our ideas about it.
As modern neuroscience is giving us deeper insight into the wide neuro- and perceptual diversity of people, it is also giving us new explanations of differences in people’s experience of reality and, accordingly, their philosophical intuitions and beliefs. According to the predictive processing theory of brain function, the reality we experience as objective and independently existing, is to a large degree created by our brain, a projection based on our brain’s best guesses about the external reality and as such a form of controlled hallucination. And as Anil Seth has recently pointed out, since we all have different brains, we will naturally make different guesses about the external reality we encounter and thus have different perceptual experiences of reality. “Just as it serves us well to occasionally question our social and political beliefs, it’s useful to know that others can literally see things differently to us, and that these differences may evolve into different beliefs and behaviours.”
The growing insight into perceptual diversity, then, gives way to an increased possibility of biographically understanding and explaining philosophers’ theories and as such allows for a new form of ‘neuro-biographical’ reading of philosophy.
It seems plausible that the flipside of a reduced sense of the past and future is an increased connection to and absorption in the present and a weaker identification with a continuous personal narrative and a coherent and substantial self. Parfit’s diminished sense of continuity of identity and substantiality of his own self – which he himself explicitly links to his aphantasia – may well have led him towards or at least strengthened his anti-essential views of personhood.
Likewise, my own aphantasia could at least in part explain my intellectual preference for and easy identification with non-essential conceptions of self in both Western philosophy and Buddhism. The question is, then, whether the condition of aphantasia gives people like Parfit and me a shortcut to enlightenment and clearer philosophical insight into and intuitive understanding of the human condition and nature of reality. Or, does it obscure the truth by barring us from dimensions that are integral to the most common human experience and installing intuitions that do not correspond to the norm?
As neuroscience and neurotechnology continue to develop and give us better understanding of the variations and differences in the neurological constitution of brains, it will be interesting to see to how far the awareness of perceptual differences and specificity can reach in the explanation of differences in philosophical intuitions and beliefs – and to what extent it can disqualify philosophical positions and theories. The notion of perceptual diversity offers a valuable route for philosophers to exercise self-criticism, scrutinise their theories and intuitions and investigate the underlying perceptions and experiences. At the same time, it troubles some of the fundamental concepts on which the discipline of philosophy relies, paving the way for further relativisation and destabilisation of the already undermined notion of objective truth and rationality and potentially removing us further from consensus.
“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love,” the artist Louise Bourgeois wrote in her diary. How much trust and love we wrest from life and lavish upon life is largely a matter of how well we have befriended our existential loneliness — a fundamental fact of every human existence that coexists with our delicate interconnectedness, each a parallel dimension of our lived reality, each pulsating beneath our days.
In When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times (public library) — her timeless field guide to transformation through difficult times — the Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön explores what it takes to cultivate “a nonthreatening relationship with loneliness,” to transmute it into a different kind of “relaxing and cooling loneliness” that subverts our ordinary terror of the existential void.
She writes:
When we draw a line down the center of a page, we know who we are if we’re on the right side and who we are if we’re on the left side. But we don’t know who we are when we don’t put ourselves on either side. Then we just don’t know what to do. We just don’t know. We have no reference point, no hand to hold. At that point we can either freak out or settle in. Contentment is a synonym for loneliness, cool loneliness, settling down with cool loneliness. We give up believing that being able to escape our loneliness is going to bring any lasting happiness or joy or sense of well-being or courage or strength. Usually we have to give up this belief about a billion times, again and again making friends with our jumpiness and dread, doing the same old thing a billion times with awareness. Then without our even noticing, something begins to shift. We can just be lonely with no alternatives, content to be right here with the mood and texture of what’s happening.
In Buddhism, all suffering is a form of resistance to reality, a form of attachment to desires and ideas about how the world should be. By befriending our loneliness, we begin to meet reality on its own terms and to find contentment with the as-is nature of life, complete with all of its uncertainty. Chödrön writes:
We are fundamentally alone, and there is nothing anywhere to hold on to. Moreover, this is not a problem. In fact, it allows us to finally discover a completely unfabricated state of being. Our habitual assumptions — all our ideas about how things are — keep us from seeing anything in a fresh, open way… We don’t ultimately know anything. There’s no certainty about anything. This basic truth hurts, and we want to run away from it. But coming back and relaxing with something as familiar as loneliness is good discipline for realizing the profundity of the unresolved moments of our lives. We are cheating ourselves when we run away from the ambiguity of loneliness.
So faced, loneliness becomes a kind of mirror — one into which we must look with maximum compassion, one that beams back to us our greatest strength:
Cool loneliness allows us to look honestly and without aggression at our own minds. We can gradually drop our ideals of who we think we ought to be, or who we think we want to be, or who we think other people think we want to be or ought to be. We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment. Cool loneliness doesn’t provide any resolution or give us ground under our feet. It challenges us to step into a world of no reference point without polarizing or solidifying. This is called the middle way, or the sacred path of the warrior.
Complement with Rachel Carson on the relationship between loneliness and creativity and Barry Lopez on the cure for our existential loneliness, then revisit poet May Sarton’s splendid century-old ode to the art of being contentedly alone.
For a decade and half, I have been spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each month composing The Marginalian (which bore the unbearable name Brain Pickings for its first fifteen years). It has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, no assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor makes your own life more livable in any way, please consider lending a helping hand with a donation. Your support makes all the difference.
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no-self
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Woman looking in a mirror: does she see her self?
Readers of the Indian Philosophy Blog may be interested to learn about a new article in the latest issue of the Journal of World Philosophies: “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Modern Public Sphere” by Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University). The journal is open-access, and you can download the article here.
Here’s the abstract:
There is widespread and warranted skepticism about the usefulness of inclusive and epistemically rigorous public debate in societies that are modeled on the Habermasian public sphere, and this skepticism challenges the democratic form of government worldwide. To address structural weaknesses of Habermasian public spheres, such as susceptibility to mass manipulation through “ready-to-think” messages and tendencies to privilege and subordinate perspectives arbitrarily, interdisciplinary scholars should attend to traditions of knowledge and public debate that are not rooted in western colonial/modern genealogies, such as the Sanskritic traditions of pramāṇavāda and vāda. Attention to vāda, pramāṇavāda, and other traditions like them can inspire new forms of social discussion, media, and digital humanities, which, in turn, can help to place trust in democracy on foundations that are more stable than mere (anxious) optimism.
I enjoyed reading the article, and I found it extremely thought-provoking. I hope readers of this blog will check it out. Also, be sure to look for the forthcoming online debate platform that Donahue mentions on p. 5! Maybe we’ll make an announcement on the blog when it’s ready. Or reach out to Dr. Donahue if you’re interested in collaborating.
Here are a few of my questions for further discussion:
My questions here are meant to be taken in the spirit of vāda to keep the conversation going. I hope others will read Donahue’s thought-provoking article and join this worthwhile conversation.
Also, if you will be attending the upcoming Central APA Conference in Denver, Colorado, USA on Feb. 22, 2023, you will have the chance to discuss these and other issues in person!
Wed. Feb. 22, 2023, 1-4pm
2022 Invited Symposium: Vāda: Indian Logic and Public Debate
Chair: Jarrod Brown (Berea College)
Speakers:
Amy Donahue (Kennesaw State University) “Vāda Project: A Non-Centric Method for Countering Disinformation”
Arindam Chakrabarti (University of Hawai’i at Manoa) “Does the Question Arise? Questioning the Meaning of Questions and the Definability of Doubt”
Ethan Mills (University of Tennessee at Chattanooga) “Cārvāka Skepticism about Inference: Historical and Contemporary Examples”
(More information about the conference here, including a draft program that includes several other panels on Indian philosophy.)
Works Cited
Donahue, Amy. 2022. “Pramāṇavāda and the Crisis of Skepticism in the Public Sphere.” Journal of World Philosophies 7 (Winter 2022): 1-14.
Matilal, Bimal Krishna. 1998. The Character of Logic in India. Edited by Jonardon Ganeri and Heeraman Tiwari. Albany: SUNY Press.
In Part One, I discussed Sonam Kachru’s criticisms (Kachru 2021) of some of my earlier work on Vasubandhu’s Twenty Verses (Mills 2017).
I ended the previous post with a question: what if we were to listen carefully to Vasubandhu in his own terms, and learn from what he has to say?
This attitude toward the text can challenge understandings of Western categories. Whereas most pragmatists, phenomenologists, and a certain type of analytic philosopher diagnose external-world skepticism as a metaphysical failure to appreciate the entanglement of mind and world, I think Vasubandhu suggests that entangled though mind and world may be (and it’s hard to imagine them being more entangled than in Mahāyāna Buddhist non-dualism!), the cognitive failure of regular human experience is a failure to appreciate how fundamentally mistaken we are in our regular cognitive lives—in light of the fact this very entanglement.
It may be that Vasubandhu shows us something about skeptical inquiries into perception, broadly construed: such epistemological inquiries do not rely on any particular metaphysical framework. (I personally have long thought the anti-skeptical strategy of trying to reduce the epistemological problem of skepticism about the external world to a metaphysical problem of mind and world is a huge mistake, but that’s somewhat besides Vasubandhu’s point as he seems to be doing something more like working out the epistemological consequences of the metaphysics of non-dualism).
I think some contemporary interpreters fail to understand how thoroughly revisionary and revolutionary Vasubandhu’s philosophy is; whereas most contemporary anti-skeptical strategies seek to preserve regular human experience against a philosophical abstraction, Vasubandhu wants to challenge the dogmatic attachment inherent in the regular human experience of thinking our way of seeing things is the right way or the only way (a point I think Kachru and others could make better without appeals to contemporary anti-skeptical strategies!).
So, am I saying, after all this, that Vasubandhu really is a skeptic, just not as we know it? (“We” here means, I guess, 21st century academics writing in English). Maybe. I don’t know.
My own attempts in the past to argue for skeptical interpretations of classical Indian philosophers (e.g., Mills 2018) have often met with resistance precisely because most contemporary philosophers have a (dare I say it?) dogmatic attachment to a specific version of external-world skepticism inculcated in them by contemporary interpretations of Descartes and in contemporary analytic epistemology (this modern view of skepticism is in my opinion also deeply at odds with ancient “Western” skepticisms like Pyrrhonism and Academic skepticism).
At this point I’m willing to cede the label “skepticism.” I no longer care whether Vasubandhu or any other classical Indian philosopher is a “skeptic,” partly due to the unwillingness of my academic colleagues to rethink their own definition of skepticism as a category, but mostly because whatever Vasubandhu and others are doing is philosophically interesting no matter what Western categories we apply to them.
It’s time to stop pretending that classical Indian philosophers have to be subjected to the procrustean bed of Western categories to be interesting or worthy of study or respect in the discipline. I study Indian philosophy because it’s philosophically interesting in its own terms, not because it can glom on to whatever’s popular in mainstream analytic or continental philosophy this month.
While I’ve moved more in the direction of the type of textual work that prevails in Indology or Area Studies, I’m not quite there, either (I never make things easy for myself!). While understanding texts in their historical context is important, at times this approach can leave one a bit too limited by linguistic history or the traditions of interpretation that came before and after a text, leaving little room for innovative philosophical understandings of individual texts (European Indology has its own problematic Orientalist history to contend with as well).
Vasubandhu was obviously responding to the Buddhist traditions before him and he has been taken up in certain ways by centuries of Buddhist and non-Buddhist scholars that have come after him, but I also think Vasubandhu has something unique to say that is not captured by Buddhism in general or even Yogācāra in general. At least if we bother to listen to him carefully.
Nor am I denying that all interpretation today takes place in a postcolonial political context or that each reader doesn’t bring their own preconceptions (in a Gadamerian sense) to the text (my own philosophical preconceptions have been shaped by Buddhism as much as anything else; I learned about the Four Noble Truths long before I learned about semantic realism). I’m not saying we should assume we 21st century scholars have a transparent insight into the one true nature of a text for all times. Such would be hopelessly naïve, and in any case goes against the very spirit of what Vasubandhu is telling us about normal human experience!
Going forward, maybe I’ll say Vasubandhu was working out the epistemology of non-dualism, or maybe we can just call it early Yogācāra and let it speak for itself (even if later Yogācāra philosophers do come close to the Western category of “idealism,” I think reducing Vasubandhu to “idealism” is just as problematic as reducing him to “skepticism” or “phenomenalism” or “phenomenology”). I don’t know where I will go next, but I will keep trying to think with Vasubandhu as best I can.
Helpful though comparative philosophy can be at times, sometimes it can be yet another problematic causal factor in our experience of ancient texts. I thank Sonam Kachru for his part in inciting me to think more deeply about my own previous scholarly experience of Vasubandhu and other classical Indian philosophers, moving instead toward listening carefully to what these texts have to say for themselves.
……………………………………….
Works Cited
Kachru, Sonam. 2021. Other Lives: Mind and World in Indian Buddhism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Mills, Ethan. 2017. “External-World Skepticism in Classical India: The Case of Vasubandhu.” International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 7 (3): 147-172.
——. 2018. Three Pillars of Skepticism in Classical India: Nāgārjuna, Jayarāśi, and Śrī Harṣa. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
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